If we are ever asked to imagine what a Neandertal was like,
most of us would think of some half-witted cretin. In fact, the word Neandertal
is often used as a term of abuse. It generally signifies that the individual
to whom reference is being made acts brutishly and has very little feeling
for others. This is a pity, because the more we learn about the Neandertals,
the more we are forced to conclude that although they may have looked
brutish, they were very caring people, who looked after the sick and elderly
members of their communities.

The Neandertals are named after the Neander Valley, not
far from Düsseldorf in Germany. The fossilized remains of a Neandertal
man were first found there in a cave in 1857. Since then, remains of Neandertals
have been found in western Europe, the Near East, and western Asia. Compared
with modern Europeans, the Neandertal people were rather robust, and so
for almost a century it was mistakenly believed that they were half way
between ape-like creatures and humans.1

If a Neandertal man were bathed, shaved, and dressed in modern clothing he would probably pass unnoticed in a New York subway!

The idea that the Neandertals were a link between apes and
humans was reinforced by drawings which depicted them as stooping half-ape/half-human
brutes ambling along on the outsides of their feet, like some oversized
chimpanzee. This view persisted until the mid-1950s when a couple of American
anatomists concluded that there was no valid reason for assuming that
the Neandertal posture was different from that of modern humans. They
went on to suggest that if a Neandertal man were bathed, shaved, and dressed
in modern clothing he would probably pass unnoticed in a New York subway!2

It has also been suggested that much of the brutish appearance
of the Neandertals, such as their eyebrow ridges, is due to the enormous
chewing stress on the skull imposed by their powerful jaws. And this was
due to the common eating of tough food. They are now placed in the same
species as modern-day humans, being put into the sub-species Homo sapiens
neanderthalensis (with us being in the sub-species Homo sapiens
sapiens). However, the bony differences between them and modern people
may be the result of trivial genetic differences. Similarly, people of
modern ‘races’ today look more different than they are at the
genetic level. Some ‘Neandertal’ bony characteristics are
found in some Europeans today.

Neandertal facts

The spellings Neandertal and Neanderthal (with
the added h) are both correct. Different authorities
have adopted their own preferences.

Both Oxford (UK) and Webster’s (US) dictionaries
have traditionally favoured the pronunciation of the word as
nee-AN-der-tal, even when spelt with the h. In
recent years the pronunciation nee-AN-der-thal has become
common, and is the only pronunciation listed in Australia's
Macquarie Dictionary.

From their remains, it has been discovered that some of
the Neandertal people suffered from rickets. Rickets is a disease of childhood
resulting from a deficiency of Vitamin D. Because this vitamin helps the
absorption of calcium from the food we eat, people suffering from rickets
have soft bones which cause them to have swollen joints and distorted
limbs—sometimes they are extremely bow-legged, but in more severe
cases they are completely crippled and unable to walk.

Vitamin D is found in fish oils, milk, and dairy products.
If your diet is deficient in these, you may develop rickets. The fact
that some Neandertals suffered from rickets indicates that they had a
diet which lacked these products. However, you can get Vitamin D another
way—Vitamin D is made in the skin when it is exposed to sunlight.
From this we are able to conclude that the Neandertal people who had rickets
must have lived at a time when they would not have been exposed to much
sunlight—such as during the Ice Age.

Some of the Neandertal people suffered from arthritis, while
others sustained injuries during their lifetime - perhaps by falling over
when hunting. Broken bones were not uncommon. Although such people were
no longer productive members of their community, they were cared for by
other members of their tribe. Their bones demonstrate that they kept on
living long after the onset of their disability. This shows that these
people had tender feelings for each other—sometimes apparently providing
support for those they knew would never get better.

From the evidence discovered, it can be deduced that the
Neandertals were good hunters, making and using rather elegant stone tools
effectively. They lived in huts which they sometimes located in caves.
They kept warm with fires on which they burned bones—because it
was the middle of an Ice Age, when there were not many trees growing in
Europe. They cooked their food on fires, sometimes using stone hot plates.
They wore clothes which they made by sewing animal skins together. In
fact, far from being dull-witted brutes, these people were quite sophisticated—there
is even evidence of a form of writing!

The Neandertal people also had a sense of the after-life—they
buried their dead with ceremony and arranged flowers around the bodies
of their dead. A pollen analysis of one grave from the Shanidar cave in
the Zagros Mountains in Iraq has revealed the presence of yarrow, cornflower,
St Barnaby’s thistle, ragwort, grape hyacinth, hollyhock, and woody
horsetail. Most of these plants are known to have herbal and medicinal
properties, so it appears that the Neandertals had some knowledge of medicine.

None of this is surprising when we consider that they were
not primitive evolutionary ‘links’. They were people, forced
to live in harsh conditions, after the dispersal of humanity at Babel,
during the great post-Flood Ice Age.3

Footnotes

Anthropologist Marcellin Boule was responsible for much of the attribution
of ‘subhuman’ characteristics to Neandertals. It seems that
what really persuaded him about the truth of human evolution was the
Piltdown skull, which later turned out to be a clever fraud. In turn,
this conviction caused him to emphasize and exaggerate some characters
in Neandertal bones to fit the ‘subhuman’ idea.